


like dirty water

by Trojie



Series: Pity [3]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Casual Sex, M/M, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-08
Updated: 2013-05-08
Packaged: 2017-12-10 19:19:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/789215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were three languages on the Rosetta Stone, and two of them were unknowns</p>
            </blockquote>





	like dirty water

Eames is always amazed at Arthur's hard-headed capacity for facing uncertain death relatively unphased. Oh, he'll try and troubleshoot his way out of things before they become actual 'situations', and he'll try to find alternate methods, and he'll try to find entire other jobs, but once Arthur's decided he's going to do something, he does it, even if it turns out to be only doable via a complicated method of waltzing over boiling shark-infested lava. Backing down in the face of anything is just not in Arthur's nature.

Backing down in the face of a person is something else. Arthur is very good at hierarchy. Arthur is a natural-born second-in-command, and he's worked with Cobb as his leader for so long that it only takes a certain kind of squint and a certain tone of voice, a certain kind of doubt …

Not that Eames would ever. Even if he has Cobb's intonation fairly pitch-perfect, and he wants to, because it throws him a little to see Arthur shrug off his own admission of affection so easily. To Eames's practiced eye, it looks like Arthur's thought process was along the lines of 'I'm in love. It's not returned. Oh well, back to the job,' which is just a little ridiculous, and has him grasping for an explanation. _No-one_ takes rejection like that. 

Eames ought to know. He's rejected enough people.

Three and a half months after Arthur and Eames slept together (which is a very tame phrase for a series of acts that ruined the furnishings of an extremely expensive hotel room and left sweaty handprints and suspicious streaks on a floor-to-ceiling window), here they are again on a job, fortunately one without lava or sharks just yet, and Arthur hasn't changed. He still lets Eames taunt him just enough to keep them both entertained, and he still … acts completely competently. Nothing to indicate that he got what he wanted, or he that wants more, or that he's pining, or that he's over it, or that he's anything but a man with a job to do. 

And yet. Every so often he still looks at Eames in the way that Eames knows, _knows_ in the pit of his stomach, translates to some kind of want. 

It makes Eames twist a little, like a flag hanging in a breeze. He's never had this problem before - relationships have been easy to get into, easier to get out of, and he always moves on, usually before they have a chance to become a relationship at all. He likes his life like that. But his path and Arthur's cross every so often, and he respects Arthur. Respects him enough that there's second-hand embarrassment for him in seeing the point-man give away that hint of vulnerability. 

He tries not to look, but sometimes things happen that make him see whether he wants to or not.

Like this: Gurunathan, their extractor, gets taken out seven minutes into their job, and Arthur keeps Sedgwick's militarised projections at bay for four minutes and forty-three seconds while Eames memorises the intriguing little details of the man's finger in the methamphetamine-trade pie, and then has a split-second's worth of seeing the red bead of a laser-sight on Arthur's forehead before they're both taken down -

\- and they wake up tied up with Gurunathan's corpse between them, because clearly Sedgwick's friends like to be dramatic and psychological and haven't worked out that a corpse is hardly the most horrific thing either of them has seen in their chequered careers in dreamsharing. Arthur's double-jointed in one arm, which gets them out of the ropes (rope? Honestly? And will they be shot with muskets later? What's wrong with zip-ties, for God's sake?), but Eames's little H&K has been removed from his groin holster so they're free but locked in and unarmed. 

Methamphetamine dealers, much like their customers, tend to the twitchy. Which means that when they come in, Eames gets slightly shot before anyone can do anything sensible. He doesn't remember the details particularly well - blood-loss will do that to a man - but he does remember Arthur's angry face and the sounds of bones breaking, and then later he remembers pain, the feel of bits of bullet being removed from his thigh and Arthur saying something about tying off the femoral artery. But that's all fuzzy. That's details, that's what happened, that's history. Not important.

Arthur's careful, slightly chilly fingers finding the pulse in his neck, he remembers with crystal clarity. They're sticky with what he logically assumes later was his own blood. 

'Stay with me, Eames,' Arthur says, and that burns its way into Eames's anoxic, anaemic brain, along with the shape of Arthur's mouth as he says it, and that cross-references itself to Arthur one night in a hotel room with a stomach full of bourbon and a head full of nonsense and an arse full of Eames's tongue and fingers, and Eames thinks _define love_ before he passes out entirely. 

***

Eames doesn't bleed out on that carpet. Arthur patches him up enough to get him out of there, and then leaves him in a cleanish, safe-ish, _hidden_ squat - not very pretty, but far out of anyone's way, just in case someone decides to come finish what Sedgwick and co. started. Eames spends a month fastidiously boiling water and changing dressings until he's healed enough to face a long-haul flight, and then he starts looking around for some work, which is harder than you'd think. There really aren't that many jobs that actually need a forger. 

Eames is a passable extractor in his own right, but he's not that good. Other than forgery, his real talent is that he's a bit of a one-man-band - solo jobs tend to be the majority of his work. Most multiplayer jobs attract _teams_ , like Cobb and Arthur used to be, with extra roles contracted out.

Like the Fischer job. Hah.

But there's nothing, even dredging the blackest pits of Eames's contacts list. So he makes a phonecall he'd rather not be making, because it's either do that or moulder here - he's got enough money for one flight out. He needs to make that flight count, make enough money using it that he has enough to get him another flight, and another one, and another. Story of his life, really.

On the other end, the phone rings precisely two and a half times, before it's picked up and Arthur's voice says, 'Hello?'

With a niggling feeling that this is sort of taking advantage, Eames says, 'I need your help.' And then he sighs, and adds, 'Again.'

'Funny,' says Arthur on the other end. 'Because I could use yours, actually.'

***

So, Arthur has an adrenaline-junkie chemist, Zahara, who supplies Somnacin to her borderline-addict extractor girlfriend Sally, who in turn supplies Zahara with excitement. Boatloads of it, usually derived from mind-crime and running from the consequences of it.

Eames kind of wonders why Arthur is putting up with them and then realises that they hired him, not the other way round. 

'Oh God, is Yusuf still peddling that I'm-so-talented, dream-within-a-dream shit?' Zahara says in gales of laughter after she's known Eames for an hour and they've been swapping information, also known as gossiping, in the office. Arthur is eavesdropping but not participating. 'Everyone who knows one end of a sedative from the other can do that, jeez. Next time you see him, you tell him Zahara says he needs to get out of the lab once in a decade at least, yeah?' 

'I'll pass it along,' says Eames sincerely and untruthfully. 

Zahara takes a drag on her cigarette and adds in a more serious tone, 'And you can tell him from me that the journal's looking for contributions. Pseuds accepted, obviously, and if I know it's coming from him I'll flick it to the top of the pile.'

Eames' ears metaphorically prick. He's been hearing some things about what the chemist fraternity are up to, things that could just get everyone in very, very deep Interpol, CIA, Men In Black style shit … 'Journal?' he asks, as if he has no idea what she's talking about.

She rolls her eyes. 'We're scientists, sweetie. We publish. That's how it works.'

'It just seems like an unnecessary risk,' Eames says, shrugging. 'And anyway, how do you keep your edge if everyone's sharing recipes?'

'Oh, we don't share our … special tweaks.' Zahara winks. 'But the basics - that's the only way this stays safe. The fact that you're sitting here talking to me lucidly tells me all of your chemists have been using peer-reviewed compounds. If they'd been making their own moonshine there's no telling what fun side-effects you could be suffering from right now. Yusuf's one of the best, don't get me wrong -'

'Which is why you're soliciting him for your journal?'

'Naturally. I'd love it if he'd share his group-dreaming formulae - is it true he can keep more than ten people under at a time?'

Eames raises his right hand in a Scout's salute. 'Seen it with my own eyes.' Can't hurt Yusuf to be well-thought-of amongst his peers, after all. Chemists are a lot less cut-throat than extractors. 

Actually, pretty much everyone is less cut-throat than extractors - chemists and architects because their jobs benefit from collaboration and group-thinking, forgers because there are precious bloody few of them, and point-men because they all seem to engage in some twisted game of cat and mouse with each other and there's no fun in just _cutting the throats_ of your opponents. Whereas extractors, or at least, middling and crappy extractors, are two-a-penny. Anyone who isn't allergic to Somnacin can call themselves an extractor and if they can attract a decent point-man they might even survive their first attempt at a heist. 

So most of them spend an awful lot of time trying to stab each other in the back.

Which is a point. Eames has no idea what Sally's like as an extractor, although clearly she can't be that bad, because she's still alive, and she managed to hire Arthur, who does not work with incompetent people. She takes that moment, naturally, to burst in through the door of the office they're working in, hug Arthur around the neck exuberantly in a way that makes him grin over the top of the manila folder he's annotating, and zip around his desk to snog Zahara right as she's about to say something further about Yusuf.

'You must be Eames,' Sally says when she comes up for air, and she offers him her hand matter-of-factly. 'Arthur's told me a _lot_ about you.'

'And by process of elimination you must be Sally,' Eames says, shaking her hand. 

'If we're done with the introductions?' Arthur asks, and starts handing round manila folders.

Passing one to Eames, he moves on to hand the next to Sally, and Eames, looking up, catches Zahara's eye. She looks pointedly at Arthur, then back at Eames, and she raises an eyebrow, and winks.

_Oh fuck_ , thinks Eames, wondering what kind of 'a lot' Arthur's been spouting.

***

Arthur knocks on Eames's door that night. 

'Are we going to do this again?' Eames asks, leaning on the doorframe. 'Really?'

Arthur shrugs, hands in his pockets and affectedly nonchalant. 'That was the plan.'

Eames does not want to have this conversation in the corridor, any more than he wants to ask Arthur into his room. In the end he leaves the door open and walks back inside, Arthur following. 

'I don't understand,' Eames says eventually. They're standing some three feet apart. Arthur's hands are still in his pockets. Eames has locked his in the small of his back because the urge to reach out and take hold of Arthur by the lapels is so strong he can taste it like bile in the back of his throat. 'I thought we'd done this. I thought you'd got it out of your system.'

He used to think he could read Arthur. Either Arthur's got better at hiding himself or Eames has got worse at people, or something, but he's staring at Arthur right now and he's got nothing. 

Arthur gives him an odd look. 'I came to ask if your thigh's healing okay,' he says carefully, and then shrugs. 'But I guess we could do that, too.'

'Don't play with me, Arthur,' Eames says, suddenly angry. 'That's what you came here for. You just wanted me to make the move for you.' He can't stand it, that he wants to have Arthur in his arms and that he doesn't know, can't tell, if Arthur wants that too or if he just thinks Eames wants it and is … going along with it, or something, or if this is some twisted point-man plot, or something else entirely. He can't tell any more. He feels like he's been blindsided, or blinded.

'So are you going to?' Arthur takes his hands out of his pockets, spreads his arms a little, like he's daring Eames to, well, make a move. Or throw a punch. 'You know, if you're so sure of what I want.' He steps a little closer, and a little closer, and a little closer, and his face is that glorious Arthur-at-work face, made of straight lines. 'Go on, Eames. Read me. That's your job -'

\- and Eames's hands close on his lapels and pull him in, because if he's blind now then he's gonna read Arthur in fucking Braille.

And there is - there is _something_ , locked up in the curves and dips and divots of Arthur's body, in the control that tightens every muscle and sinew. And Eames ought to _know_ what all those signals mean, it ought to be his native fucking language, but right now he feels like Champollion, running his hands over the Rosetta Stone for the first time.

The key is in here somewhere. He just has to work it out.

Arthur's mouth curves in a smile against Eames's, and he shoves at Eames's shoulders until he starts moving, walking backwards with Arthur leading him like they're on a dancefloor. 

Eames gets dropped onto the mattress and Arthur sucks gentle, lingering kisses over the raging red of the channel the bullet left in his thigh, harder ones in the older scars that write his military service in the flesh of his hips and thighs, and takes Eames's cock into his mouth only eventually, after he's reduced Eames to uncomprehending gasps, after he's looked up the length of Eames, from navel to sternum and further up. Arthur's eyes are dark like fine cocoa, deep like dirty water, and something hard and warm lurks in his expression before he ducks down again. 

The blowjob is spectacular, like everything Arthur does. He keeps his waistcoat on this time, too, wipes his mouth delicately on his bloody pocket square, and fishes a tube of lube out of his pocket. He doesn't undress fully at all, even when he fingers and fucks Eames back into hardness and out the other side again - clothes on, just pulled aside, and it'd be clinical except it isn't, it'd be hate-sex but there's no anger or hatred or even, really, dislike, if Eames is feeling this right. Which he probably isn't. 

He remembers, trying to read Arthur's face, Arthur's hips, Arthur's dress-sense, that there were three languages on the Rosetta Stone, and two of them were unknowns.

Arthur tucks himself away again afterwards and smooths a hand through Eames's hair, leaning over to kiss him once more, in the corner of his mouth, like a keepsake.

'I don't understand you,' says Eames, because the truth, he's been told, will set you free, and it's worth a try. 'I don't know if I ever did.'

'That's the plan,' says Arthur, and makes for the door. Reaching for the handle, he adds, 'And keep off that leg if you can.'

'Arthur -'

'I thought about this for a long time,' says Arthur, stopping and turning. He meets Eames's eyes frankly, levelly, like a man with nothing to hide.

'Fucking me?'

Arthur shrugs. 'You in general.'

Eames shoves himself up on his elbows, starts groping for his trousers. He isn't normally the one playing the role of the ravished damsel left in the bed, in these scenarios. He is so completely without a map, it's unreal. 'So what are we doing here, Arthur?' he asks.

'Tell you when I know,' Arthur says. 'But until one of us figures it out, we should probably just do what feels good at the time, right?'

***

'Aww, he got you good,' says Sally the next morning, poking a tender patch on Eames's neck. 'What's he like in the sack?'

'I walked into the doorframe,' says Eames evenly. It's a lie, and she knows it's a lie, and hopefully, she will also know it means he doesn't want to talk about it. 

She does, it seems; but she doesn't care. 'You're just like Arthur,' Sally grouses. 'You don't just not kiss and tell - you fuck around and lie about it. No fun at all.'

'What's no fun?' Arthur asks, coming in with a bag of something that's leaking butter through the paper. 

'Walking into doorframes,' says Eames, frowning sidelong at him and palming the sore place on his neck. Arthur's eyes flicker between him and Sally and back again.

'Agreed,' he says shortly, and tosses his greasy paper bag onto the table. 'Breakfast, anyone?'

Sally rolls her eyes. 'For career criminals, you boys sure can't lie worth a damn.' 

Arthur holds Eames's gaze like he dares him to disagree.


End file.
